School on stage

Have you ever wondered about the influence some parents have in school these days? Richard Martin Hirsch's new play, "The Monkey Jar," takes a look at that question and others.

The action develops when a 10-year-old boy, the Asian adopted son of Jewish parents, takes a gun to school and allegedly threatens his teacher. The play explores issues of race, class, political correctness, and the effect on the school's pristine reputation.

Performances of the play begin Saturday on the Beverly Hills High School campus at Theatre 40's Reuben Cordova Theatre. For more information, visit Theatre 40.

Isabel Storey, the producer, said that as a parent, she found the issues in the play seemed familiar. "But I had never seen this reflected in a play." Although the story is fiction, she said, the seed for it was an incident at Hirsch's daughter's school.

-- Mary MacVean